Best way to get a developer working for you?

I would like to know what is the best way to hire someone to help you building a web-site. I heard about guru.com and elance but I am not convinced that I can get someone from there who can help me to build my website.

I was wondering if there is anyone who has experience with those sites or can share his/her story about hiring someone to do some work?

If you need one-time help for a small coding project, sites such as elance work fine. Their main problem is that there is no committment on the part of the developer. On the contrary, in order for developers to make a living on such sites, they need to move on as quickly as possible to the next cheap gig.

Personally, I believe in motivating people with some real rewards, make them feel part of the team. A mistake I made in the past was to assume that code could be written once. Actually, code mostly needs to be maintained. That means that you'll want the developer to stick around and be available to tweak things over time.

I shared a story in the past about how we switched from outsourced development after two weeks. It was just horrible. But to be fair, we were fairly experienced developers ourselves, so we could tell right away that something was wrong. If you don't have the technical background, it could take a while.

I don't know how technical you are so this answer may be a bit vague. In order to hire someone to help you build a web site you need to:

1. Define the audience for your web site. (Is your audience technical, non-technical, experienced, business, consumer.....)
2. Define the time frame for your web site build. The faster it needs to be built the more expensive it will be. (And probably the more problematic it will be.)
3. Define your budget. How much do you have to spend?
4. Define your hosting requirements. What are your projected bandwidth and storage requirements? Do you need special web site features? (php, SSL, ASP, CF...)
5. Define what you want your web site to do and how you want it to look.

If you are planning on outsourcing this web development you will need strong, clear, written specifications for each part of your web site. Without that you will have a disaster. If you can't do the above items then you need someone to first help you design your web site, which is not the same thing as building a web site.

Once you get past the written part you need to concentrate on the hiring part. Depending on the project length you can:

1. Hire someone part time / full time locally to work on this on a project basis. You get really great control, but the project will cost more.
2. Hire a specialist (use those networking skills) within the same state or country that you live in. Your control will not be as good as 1) above- but someone within country will usually be easier to deal with than someone outside your country.
3. Use one of the web based outsourcing sites to get people to bid on your job. You will need very clear specifications and deliveries to ensure this isn't a waste of money. You cost will be the lowest with this approach, but the chances of failure are the greatest.